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webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of March, 2017.

Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?March 01, 2017(comments)
Jack Dorsey posts incognito as phase one of his search for Twitter's next part-time CEO. One Hackernews suggests maybe not flushing two billion dollars a year down the toilet, and is immediately attacked as unreasonable. The rest of Hackernews debates the merits of charging monthly fees, which nobody would ever pay, or else suggests approaches taken by failed companies in the past.

Nintendo Switch review: pure potentialMarch 02, 2017(comments)
An internet posts an entirely content-free assesment of a brand-new product based on six hours of use. Hackernews is pissed that this video game console isn't an ipad, a phone, a laptop, or a different, older video game console. Some idiots take this opportunity to rekindle the SNES vs Genesis flamewar.

Why we are not leaving the cloudMarch 03, 2017(comments)
Some internets retract a previous blog post, based on blog comments. This would not normally be interesting, except in this case the blog post in question was corporate policy. Given that this company is the same one that accidentally shitcanned customer data and thus discovered none of their five backups worked, customers may want to consider migrating away from this service unless they see a CTO posting in their "Careers" page. Hackernews copies and pastes all the previous blog comments into this thread.

How we secretly introduced Haskell and got away with itMarch 04, 2017(comments)
Some idiots replace an overbuilt, needlessly-complicated cron replacement written in Python with an overbuilt, needlessly-complicated cron replacement written in haskell. Their claimed advantages boil down to "compiling." Hackernews immediately realizes two things:

Any time you rewrite an existing system you will have fewer bugs, since you are more familiar with implementation details in its context.

Since there's nothing interesting in this article about functional programming, this is a perfect opportunity for the Rust Evangelism Strikeforce to circle up and get lubed.

A Programmer’s Introduction to UnicodeMarch 05, 2017(comments)
Indistinguishable Unicode Primer #4,592 is posted to the internet. Hackernews trades implementation trivialities they encountered while they each implemented all of typography from scratch in javascript. One particularly dense Hackernews unironically recommends something Joel Spolsky wrote, but even Hackernews knows that guy is a dipshit. The rest of the comments are entertaining, if you like watching professional programmers confuse each other about the differences between bytes, characters, and code points.

Akiyoshi's Illusion PagesMarch 06, 2017(comments)
Hackernews considers some optical illusions. Half of them pine for the days of HTML 3, the other half wonder if androids dream of electric Escher. One guy posts his undergraduate thesis in computer vision. Nobody replies.

World’s richest doctor gave away millions, then steered the cash to his companyMarch 07, 2017(comments)
A reporter catches some rich guy laundering money through a university, but not in time to stop him, or have any other effect. Hackernews spends some time being nonprofit fiduciary experts, until someone reminds us that Beatus Graham publicly espoused the holy virtue of Naughtiness, at which point the wagons are circled and the Doublethink Cavalry defends the pioneers. Meanwhile, the money launderer is being considered for Federal office.